Savages

There is something about good animation that hits to the heart, whether it is Up, Wallace and Gromit or Claude Barras’s own Oscar-nominated My Life as a Courgette. His latest effort, Savages, is no different. Like his and Nick Park’s best work, it utilises stop motion brilliantly to convey raw emotion. In this case, our deep feelings about the state of the planet.

In that sense, a comparison can be made to the severely underrated 1990s animation FernGully: The Last Rainforest in terms of themes, though this film serves more as a showcase for Barras’s distinctive stop-motion flair. Its depictions of nature are genuinely beautiful, while its soundtrack of the forest is an education in itself about Borneo, the threatened Indonesain paradise island where the story is set.

Upon witnessing her fellow palm oil plantation workers kill an orangutan, Kéria (Babette De Coster) and her father (Benoît Poelvoorde) strive to save the baby primate from a similar fate. They bring it home, and Kéria becomes a mother figure to the ape, whom she names Oshi, inspired by a sneeze.

However, her younger cousin Selaï (Martin Verset) has other ideas and runs away with Oshi into the forest. A reunion is obviously inevitable but the heart of the film in terms of plot is the fight to protect Oshi’s habitat from the rapacious palm oil profiteers.

With My Life as a Courgette Barras showed he could make the mundanity of tragic everyday life beautiful. With Sauvages he shows beautiful things we may be close to losing can be superlatively so. Yet it is Barras’s animation that truly takes center stage, giving a rich sense of a world that is not yet lost but, if news reports are anything to go by, soon might be. As Kéria, Selaï and Oshi navigate the jungle’s perils, including encounters with poisonous snakes, they not only learn lessons about their heritage but also about the threatened paradise on their doorstep. Through their growth, we too learn and grow.

We all need to care more about our environment, and perhaps the way we might are films like Sauvages that provide a non-hectoring reason to ensure our children get to see it. All in all, this makes the picture a strong recommendation to both go and see at the cinema and – when it becomes available – watch at home with the family. 

Mark Worgan

Sauvages does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival 2024 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.